POST FROM MY FRIEND, KENNY SPROOGLES

Hi. Kenny Sproogles here. I’m a good friend of I. Myte Slam My Ham. And I’m honored to be able to post onto the blog of such a noted personage. I am so lucky to have a friend such as him.
So. Ya wanna know what’s on my mind? Well, I’ve gotta say, something’s been bothering me for a while.
Okay, we’re in the midst of all this war shit on the T.V. and everything.
All right. Let me step back a bit. The war is real. Forgive me. I know it, I feel it. I read about and am, of course, very concerned and upset. And truly saddened by the butchery of innocents on all sides.
So, being concerned, I reached for the T.V. And that’s one of the things. I’m of the first generation to basically have the thing there all the time.
And in so many ways it’s been an incredible blessing. Through television we could see real history in the making. It would bring us all closer in this world. We’d all be witnesses. So it was harder for lies to flourish.
Too many instances to list probably and this isn’t really the point. But look at Murrow-McCarthy. One example of The Big Lie being less possible because of TV.
Or the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Soviets had to try and peddle their half-assed, half-baked lies to a whole world watching.
Okay, again. This is not really what’s on my mind. Suffice it to say that TV is revolutionary. It enables us, in a healthy democracy, to scrutinize in person what’s going on. It can make possible new types and new depth of analysis and perspective.
Now, of course, as I was quickly reminded when I reached for the TV to help me in knowing and understanding, the people in charge, and obviously there are no ‘grown-ups’ around, have slipped their moorings almost completely.
Television in general, but television news in particular has become a multi-pronged assualt on the mind and spirit. And it is almost totally devoid of analysis, perspective and even simple, logical reasoning and ordering of facts.
Aw, fuck it! Let’s put it like this. It’s close to insane. There is no way that Paddy Chayefsky or Budd Schulberg, at their most jaundiced, could imagine how ‘off the hook’ television has become.
It’s a world populated by vacant-eyed perky automatons. Heads bobbing around oddly, improperly emphasizing words throughout their babbling (and they were taught to do that shit!), they trivialize, almost totally, anything of real import, and try, mindlessly, to elevate the trivial to the important, and the net effect is that our lil, electronic town hall is now not much more than an outhouse of inanity and nonsense. A wonder we’re functioning at all as a culture.
But, again, that’s not why I’m here folks. Here’s what it is.
On the TV the other day. Some guy was talking. And he was like half-way intelligent. He was talking about how he had heard ‘liberals’ talking about how just as there was a threat to our society from religious fundamentalism, there was, also, a threat from within from religious fundamentalism. I.E., he felt they, ‘the liberals’ were equating the real threat to civilization from Islamic fundamentalism with an imagined threat from evangelical Christians within our own society.
Okay. Of course, the first thing wrong with all of this, is that it was cast in those mind-numbed and idiotic terms of talk radio thinking, that whole, totally fucked-up, business of everything is ‘conservative vs. liberal’, ‘good vs. bad’. Or vice-versa, depending on whether you’re benighted enough to indulge in this shit and what side you take.
The second thing is this. It ought to be self-evident that there is an equivalency. It’s just that we have some semblance remaining of civil structure in our society and, thus, the religious wack jobs over here cannot get away with as much as the pathological nut sacks like Ahmadinejad, Nasrallah, et. al.
I don’t kid myself for a minute that our home grown tub thumpers would love nothing more than to bury adulterers up to their heads and throw rocks at them. Or kill women and men who have ‘sinned’. Or, hell, lob rockets at people who live their lives differently than they deem appropriate.
And yea, they’re a potential threat because they work hard and are influencing our politics and social life, and, it’s not entirely clear that that fella in the White House is not sympathetic to them.
Okay that’s the first and second things. But third, and here’s my real gripe. I had that idea like five years ago! And even put it out there. Admittedly, just as an impassioned letter to a mail bag of a news analysis show.
But still, I said it. And some time ago. But didn’t think it was like genius or anything. It’s just too self-evident to be a startling or world-shattering insight. At least that’s what I think.
I said, back then, that while we finally were dedicating ourselves to taking on the religious maniacs that have been under our nose since, like, 1970!!! That we ought to also dedicate ourselves to opposing, vociferously and emphatically, the religious psychos in our own midst. I mean what’s the big deal?
And really. It just wears ya down thinking about this crap anyhow. I mean I don’t even begin to understand the phemenon of obsessed, incensed fundamentalism. So …
Hmmm. I just had a thought. Could it be. And this is just a notion passing through. Could it be that our religious coo coos could be more effective if they used some of the same motivational techniques as their religious coo coos.
I mean I don’t want to give them any ideas. I sure don’t want fatwas issued from Lynchburg against the creators of the Teletubbies. Or little baby suicide bombers racing off from Sunday school to the local multi-plex to rain down fire and brimstone on the viewers of R-rated movies.
No. Don’t want that. But that suicide bomber thing? How do they do it? Is it really that 72 virgin in heaven thing?
I guess it makes a perverted sort of sense. They wrap their women up like mummies, blaming them for their own natural, sexual urges, and worse, blaming the women themselves, even to death sometimes, for, you know, even having a scintilla of natural human feeling or passion. So yea, their sexual psycho-pathology with its veneer of straight-lacedness could squirt out something like fully adult psychotic males dreaming of so many naked-and-ready babes lolling about heaven that they wouldn’t even know where to start.
I mean okay. I understand the fantasy. As an adolescent I’d actually dream at night of a James Coburn/In Like Flint world, where there’d be babes every-where ready to do your bidding. Sort of like a sexy babe candy store.
But I got over it. First, I grew up and matured half-way normally. Second, I guess, maybe, because here, well, girls can go around in bikinis, or miniskirts, and you know we can like, occasionally, kiss them or touch their breasts without some Manson-like fiend in religious garb wanting to cut off our tongues and hands. And oh yea, I guess our lips.
Wow. Now how on earth do they get girl suicide bombers to do it? Is it the same sort of rap? When they’re over at the Ramallah Sheraton at the free How To Become A Succesful Suicide Bomber seminar? Do they also tell the girls that they blow up for the cause, there’s gonna be 72 male virgins waiting around to service them when they get to their Pearly Gates?
Hmmm. That Updike fella. He wrote a book about a boy terrorist, what makes him tick and all. I think a book about a girl terrorist might be as interesting. Maybe even more so.
Hell. Maybe I could do that. Write a novel about a girl suicide bomber. I always wanted to be a novelist anyhow. That or an astronaut. Or like Crocodile Dundee maybe.
But shoot. What the hell would ya call a book like that? 72 Dicks in Heaven, The Ballad of Bomber Girl?
Okay. I gotta go hit some golf balls. Thanks Myte. I appreciate the opportunity, buddy, to share my thoughts with folks. Later.